So, Anyway . . .

Way back in May, I mentioned that I wanted to blog about Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, but I didn’t know where I’d put my copy.

So, last weekend, I was doing a last-minute scavenger hunt among the Space Marines that currently occupy the outer reaches of the living-room bookshelves, looking for characters who would serve as suitable table-top avatars for that afternoon’s game of D&D, when I suddenly noticed Beowulf hiding on the far edge of the smallest bookcase, next to The Princess Bride.

That’s frustrating in and of itself, since I was convinced that it would be either in the study or in the spare room, and tore both rooms apart looking for it. It never occurred to me that it would be in the living room—and, frankly, I still don’t don’t how it came to be on a shelf sacred to sci-fi and fantasy (and one hardback copy of Sayers’s Five Red Herrings that won’t fit anywhere else).

Still, I’ve found it now.

And this is what I wanted to talk about:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

I love these opening lines. There’s something about that opening “so” that, more than any other translation of Beowulf I’ve ever read, evokes a sense of orality in the poem, of a speaker sitting down and thinking, “now, where were we?”

This is Heaney’s intention:

Conventional renderings of hwæt, the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with ‘lo’, ‘hark’, ‘behold’, ‘attend’ and — more colloquially — ‘listen’ being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullion-speak, the particle ‘so’ came naturally to the rescue, because in that idiom ‘so’ operates as an expression that obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention.

I was going to mention that it warms the cockles of my heart to think of someone paying such attention to a two-letter word . . . and then I realised that that was foolish. These are possibly the most famous opening lines in English literature: of course you would give them your full attention.

And that colloquial, conversational “so” works far, far better in the context of Heaney’s translation than any archaic “behold” or “hark” ever could.

But the other thing that struck me about this explanation was that my mother does this.

My mother is a natural storyteller. Whenever things happen—be they amusing or disturbing or even a little dull—you can almost physically see her turning them into anecdotes in her head.

This used to drive me absolutely mad when I was younger, because she’s thoroughly ruthless in her employment of said anecdotes. All she’s worried about is whether it makes a good story: veracity has nothing to do with it. All I was concerned about as a teenager was that credit was given where credit was due: I didn’t want to be the butt of a dinner-party anecdote if the event had actually happened to my brother or my sister.

I’m more or less over that, now.

But what I have noticed recently is that my mother is not great at taking turns.

All I remember from a brief and unsatisfactory (for both parties) fling with discourse analysis many years ago was the statement that taking turns in storytelling is vital to the health of conversations and the well-being of the participants.

That doesn’t happen here.

What happens is this: my mother and I sit in the living room and chat over a glass of wine. My mother tells an amusing story. I am reminded of a funny story of my own, and tell it in turn. My mother waits patiently for me to finish, and then says “Anyway . . .”

Anyway.

Much as I love my mother, this drives me nuts.

Like Heaney’s “so,” my mother’s “anyway” operates as “an expression that obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention.”

(And I did tell her this, which was the first thing that struck me when I read the translation. I rang up, and my mother asked if I wanted anything in particular. “Not really,” I said. “I just rang up to be rude to you”—and read out the piece from the introduction. She found it hilarious, but it didn’t stop her saying “anyway.”)

To be fair, I don’t suppose it really is a call for immediate attention.

But it certainly obliterates all previous discourse and narrative. Once my mother has said “anyway,” my poor funny story may well never have been told.

So, anyway . . .